Rob DeSalle, Part 1: Hanging Our Brains on the Tree of Life

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Hanging Our Brains on the Tree of Life
Saturday, March 1, 2014
10:00 am
Rob DeSalle, Ph.D.
Curator of Entomology
American Museum of Natural History

Discussant: Robert Scharf, M.D.

The diversity of ways that organisms on this planet communicate cell to cell, and how organisms have evolved neural capacity, will be explored using a phylogenetic evolutionary tree-based approach. At another level, the structure of the brain and the workings of neural synapses can also be looked at in the same manner. By taking this phylogenetic approach the homologies of neural structures and functions can be examined in detail.